Commonly, and especially in view of recent events, systems for trading of financial instruments use a primary site for the trading, and utilize one or more replicate sites which can be designated as the new primary site if the primary site should crash or malfunction for some reason. Such replicate sites are often referred to as “fail-over” sites. In the event of a malfunction at the primary site, one of the replicate sites can be activated and start to act as a primary site, in some cases following a start-up procedure at the secondary site. Naturally, it is desired that the start up of the fail-over site, and its ability to act as a primary site, should take as little time as possible.
Conventionally, the maintaining of secondary or so called “fail-over” sites with short start-up time has been accomplished by transferring all the information used at the primary site to the secondary site. This solution has also been attractive in view of the fact that systems which support such a function are commercially available.
However, a problem in this context is that the sheer volume of information used in some trading systems is such that, for practical reasons, the information can only be transferred short distances. In view of the fact that one of the reasons for maintaining back-up sites is the ability to survive major disasters, there is a natural desire to keep a certain minimum geographical distance between the sites.
Thus, there is a conflict between the need for keeping the data transfer distances short, which would mean keeping the distance between the primary and secondary sites short, and the desire to keep a relatively large distance between the primary and secondary sites, in order to expose only one of them to the impact of a major disaster.